About Me

After college and the army, I studied acting and theater; I have an MFA in Acting and uncompleted Ph.D. in Performance Studies (ABD). I have worked as an actor, director, dramaturg/literary advisor, critic/reviewer, essayist, editor, and teacher of theater and acting (studio/conservatory, college, high school, and middle school). Several years ago, some theater friends who don't live in New York anymore asked me to keep them informed about what I see and I began sending them detailed, opinionated e-mails.

20 July 2014

'Mount Analogue'

Quite a number of years ago, when I was doing
some continuing research on the stage director Leonardo Shapiro (about whom
I’ve blogged quite a bit over the years of ROT), I came across a
reference that I couldn’t decipher.In
point of fact, it didn’t make any sense at all at first blush.I began to dig around and eventually came up
with a hypothesis, which I was able to confirm from a reliable source.This, with some side trips and tangents, is
the tale of that deductive process (actually mostly a series of
SWAG’s—Scientific, Wild-Ass Guesses).

Shapiro died in 1997, leaving behind several unfinished pieces of work,
including some play scripts, an autobiographical poem, the libretto to a
proposed opera about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the beginning of a show-biz
novel, and, most significantly for me, scattered notes for a memoir.After his death, Shapiro’s romantic partner,
Rosalía, sent me many of these fragmentary documents and I began to pore over
them, especially the sections of his memoir.Over the months and years following that, I returned to many of those bits
and pieces because, as I learned more about Shapiro’s life and work—I’d known
him since 1986 but not terribly intimately—more of what he left behind came to
mean things to me that I’d missed in earlier readings.At one rereading of the memoir in 2007, I
noticed a passage in the chronology he’d compiled, an entry for the year 1993:

Much of this was fairly straightforward to me: “London” was a
trip he’d taken with some friends and colleagues; “Rosalie” is the name Rosalía
went by in New York and “Spark” (for “Sparkie”) is his son, Spartacus, with
whom he built the house in New Mexico; “Endgame”
refers to a production he’d staged of the Samuel Beckett play (in Bengali) in
Calcutta that February; “Snow White”
was a community performance with a cast of neighborhood children he’d mounted
in his back yard as a housewarming in July; “Nothing is Lost” was a radio play he’d written.The mention of his mother being sick back
home in St. Paul (where Shapiro was born) was also clear: she had lung cancer
and Shapiro had gone to Minnesota from New Mexico to care for her (about a
year-and-a-half before he, himself, was diagnosed with inoperable bladder cancer);
Florence Shapiro died the following February.Shapiro’d written me about most of these events and he’d sent me a copy
of Nothing Is Ever Lost, or All in Good Fun with a few other scripts,
including a teleplay and a play for children (which all remained unproduced).

The note that
caught my attention this time, however, was the one about moving to Vallecito
in June.Now, of course, I knew where Shapiro’d
gone—we were in touch and he’d even invited me to come out for a visit (though
that never happened), and I’d already written a fair amount about his time
there after leaving New York City (see, for instance, “Song in the
Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009, and“Cheerleaders
of the Revolution,” 31 October 2009).Vallecito is the community where Shapiro built his retirement house, no
more than a collection of houses outside the little town of Chamisal in Taos
County, about 30 miles southwest of the city of Taos.But what was “Mt. Antalog”?I didn’t have a clue.That’s when this brief journey began.

On Monday, 6 August 2007, I e-mailed my friend Kirk (now a
frequent contributor to this blog) with some preliminary thoughts (I’ve fixed
up the abbreviated prose a little):

A few weeks ago, when I was
looking for some specific material, I went back over Leo’s memoir
fragments and his chronology. In passing, I noticed that he gave a name
to the mountain on which his New Mexico house was built, but it didn’t seem
pertinent at the time so I just let it go by. Now, while I was working on
that “American exceptionalism” stuff, I got myself sidetracked because I
finally decided I had to recast all those present-tense verbs I had into past
tense.[I posted “American Exceptionalism,” based on that same
work, on 10 December 2013.] So, I put aside my task and just went
thru each chapter to take care of all those verbs once and for all. But
as I did that, now and then something small caught my eye and I did a bit of
tinkering along the way, usually a reference—or cross-reference—that I hadn’t
spotted earlier, but now jumped out at me because I was skimming the whole book
in order over a short time. On Saturday, I started on the last
chapter, which includes most of the material about Leo’s retirement to New Mexico
and death, and Sunday afternoon I hit on the ’graph that described his move
back, and I decided to see if that name he used for his mountain would be
useful after all. I went back to the chronology and found it, but it was
odd enough to make me wonder if it was correct. He called it “Mt.
Antalog,” which just sounded strange. So I looked it up. There’s no
such place, not in NM or anywhere else I could find—or any place with even a
similar name that I could identify. I was just about to drop the idea as
impossible to verify when I decided to see what might show up if I tweaked
the name a little. (There is a word, or really an abbreviation, antilog:
it’s short for antilogarithm, but that didn’t seem to be useful.)
I tried “Mt. Analog,” assuming that maybe Leo mistyped it (or Rosalía
had—she apparently did the typing)—and lo and behold, I hit on a novel called Mount
Analogue.

Well, obviously, I had to look up the book, a French novel, and see if there was anything about
it that lined up with what I knew about Shapiro, his epistemology, and his
work.I’d never heard of it, so I had no
idea if it was a significant piece of writing or a piece of nonce junk no one
ever read, so I did some exploring on the ’Net first.My e-mail continued:

Now, it took me a little
maneuvering to get this right and find out a little something about it—have you
ever heard of it, by the way? It’s not unknown and has something of a
cult following. Let me do the bibliographical history first, then do the
content. See if any of this connects up to Leo a little. The novel
is French and the author was René Daumal, who died suddenly in 1944 before he
could complete the novel, so it’s a fragment. (One account has it that
Daumal was interrupted—in mid-sentence, the story goes—while writing the book
and then died the next day without getting back to it. That may be
apocryphal.) In any case, the novel was published [in French] unfinished
in 1952 and then translated into English and published in 1959. It was rereleased as recently as
1986. Despite its unfinished state, it’s considered one of Daumal’s best
works.

Daumal was a surrealist (among other things—he sounds like something of a
mystic, too) and the novel is about the discovery and ascent of the
invisible mountain of the title. The book contends that “transcendental
knowledge is attained through an understanding of reality and communion with
others” [according to Contemporary Authors Online].There’s more to
this—it’s pretty complex from what I gather (there’s a Wikipedia page on
the novel and one for Daumal as well)—and the fact that the novel is unfinished
has imbued it with a sort of mystical appeal on top of everything else.

This is where the potential connections with Shapiro began
to occur to me.By this time, after
having known Shapiro for 11 years, interviewing him extensively in 1992-93 for
an article in The Drama Review (which
was published in the winter issue of ’93 as “Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of
Testimony”), and continuing to do research on him even after his death, I knew
quite a lot about the avant-garde director.As I explained to Kirk:

Well, Leo said he was influenced
by the Surrealists, he was into mysticism and spiritualism, and the whole
atmosphere of the novel—including the fact that Daumal died in mid-sentence and
so on—makes me wonder if [Leo] hadn’t read the book, maybe even when he was
first in NM.(It bears some
similarities, from what I can tell, to other books I know Leo read and referred
to, especially several of [Hermann] Hesse’s, and the mystical journey is a lot
like some of the Native American myths with which he was taken.)The connection to a magical mountain seems to
clinch the association to Leo’s mountain home: the Sangre de Cristo Mountains,
where he was living, are sacred in Pueblo lore.So I’ve concluded that Leo meant to call his new home “Mt. Analogue” in
reference to the mystical mountain of the novel.He did return there to heal and recover
spiritually.[Shapiro had previously lived
in nearby Dixon in Rio Arriba County, a little over 25 miles southwest of Taos,
in 1969-71.]It seems so perfect as an
explanation.But the whole connection
seems so serendipitous that I wonder if I’m not manufacturing it.

My own insecurities wouldn’t let me accept that I’d lit (so
apparently easily) on an explanation to the enigmatic reference.So I went on to check some more resources,
looking for stronger links to Shapiro.

René Daumal (1908-44) was known for writing about spirituality and perception. In his early years, he founded a literary
journal with three friends, poets known as Simplists, who took drugs and
explored the psyche. Daumal himself used
carbon tetrachloride, which, while nearly fatal, inspired him to write “A Fundamental Experiment” (“Une Expérience
fondamentale,” 1943), an essay he originally wrote in his youth (around
1930) on the expansion of his own “consciousness from simple awareness to
drug-induced intuition to a renewed consciousness in which his perceptions were
rationalized.”

The writer continued to delve into spiritual matters and
altered states of consciousness in Le Contre-ciel (the title, which
means “counter-heaven” or “anti-heaven,” is untranslated in the English
version), a poetry collection about death, but not the death that ends life—the
death that begins it.By this time
Daumal, a friend and student of Jugendstil
(German Art Nouveau) artist Alexandre
de Salzmann, adisciple of G. I. Gurdjieff, had taught himself
Sanskrit and had translated several sacred Hindu and Zen Buddhist texts into
French.(Gurdjieff believed that most of us exist in a state of “waking
sleep,” which is possible to transcend through the “Fourth Way,” his method for
rousing our consciousnesses.De Salzmann, whom Daumal described as a “former
dervish, former Benedictine, former professor of jui-jisu, healer,
stage-designer,” introduced the writer to The Work, Gudjieff’s name for his
discipline.The character of Pierre Sogol, the leader of the expedition in Mount Analogue whose name is logos spelled backwards, is modeled on de Salzmann.) His greatest achievement
from the 1930s, however, was probably Le grande beuverie (“The great
binge,” 1938; translated as A Night of Serious Drinking), “a satire on
French society in which the author poses the ascendance of a higher spiritual
plane as an alternative to a superficial life.”

Le Mont Analogue.
Roman d’aventures alpines, non euclidiennes et symboliquement authentiques (translated as
Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in
Mountain Climbing) describes
the discovery and ascent of the mountain of the title which can only be
perceived by realizing that the climber has travelled further in going over it
than she or he would have by moving in a straight line, and can only be seen
from a particular spot when the rays of the sun strike the earth at a specified
angle.(The novel contains the first use
in literature of the word peradam, which Daumal defines as something “the unaccustomed eye hardly
perceives . . . . But to anyone who
seeks it with sincere desire and true need, it reveals itself.”In the
novel, the peradam is a precious gem found only on Mount Analogue.)The seeker in the novel sails
off in the yacht Impossible in search
of Mount Analogue, real and charted but concealed, which reaches unmistakably
towards heaven.“Early in the story,”
Roger Shattuck, translator of the 1986 American edition of Mount Analogue, explained, “we are given a picture of the most
inhuman of environments: a monastic order corrupted by mutual distrust and
denunciation.Later, on the slopes of
Mount Analogue, a sense of community emerges as one of the highest forms of
knowledge,” which happens to be one of Shapiro’s most strongly held principles
(which he’d learned from observing American Indian societies).

The voyage is a
fictionalized portrayal of the Daumal’s own spiritual quest, and in his translator’s
note, Shattuck wrote: “His journey traversed some of the most exciting
countries of the mind.”Daumal, often characterized as
one of the most gifted writers of 20th-century French literature, died of
tuberculosis at 36 before
completing Mount Analogue.The author’s unexpected and premature death,
possibly hastened by his earlier use of carbon tet which may have weakened his
lungs, lent a cachet of mystery and spirituality to the fragment he left.Though A Night of Serious Drinking
and Mount Analogue are Daumal's best-known works, many of his other
writings were published, like Mount
Analogue, posthumously.

I wrote again to Kirk: on 8 August:

I went back and had another look
at the bio and biblio stuff I found on Daumal and Mount Analogue—to see if I could make more of
it. There are a few other details that make it a philosophical fit for
Leo:

Daumal became a scholar of Hinduism and Buddhism
(Leo listed Buddhism as an influence; he was studying it himself, especially
just before his death).

Daumal had been courted by André Breton (leader
of the Surrealists), but rejected them and blazed his own trail (sort of the
opposite of [Antonin] Artaud, who was a member of the Surrealists, but was
booted out for lack of orthodoxy).

Mount
Analogue recounts a spiritual journey, a search for truth; Leo read
Hesse’s Journey to the East
which describes the same idea. Leo saw artists as people who take a
journey to another place and return to tell the rest of us what they’ve
learned. The shalako ceremony is a mirror image of this—the gods’ messengers
(that’s what the shalakos are) come to earth to collect the prayers of the
people and return with them to the spirit world [see my ROT article “‘May You Be
Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite,” 22 October 2010].
(There is also some of this journey/seeking for truth in [Hesse’s] Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Magister Ludi/The Glass Bead Game, all
of which had been important for Leo).

Mount
Analogue is considered, at least by some critics, as a sci-fi
novel; you know how much Leo was into sci-fi.

The mountain is also invisible except at a
certain angle (and you don’t know you’ve climbed it except by measuring
the distance you’ve traveled); this suggests that there’s magic in the book, as
differentiated from spirituality, another important interest of Leo’s.

In addition to the 1959 (or ’60) and ’86
publications, which were just before Leo went to Windsor Mountain [a
progressive prep school in Lenox, Massachusetts] (‘60) and moved the second
time to NM (‘92), the novel was republished again in ’96, just before Leo
died. These were all propitious moments in his life, especially in terms
of his reading. (The novel has been republished yet again, in 2004.)

I still wasn’t sure of my ground, as I observed in the same
message, but I was ready to make at least an equivocal commitment:

All of this comes without my
having read the book, so it’s not definitive. (There’s no New York Public
Library copy in the circulating collection, tho’ other Daumal books are
available. I may have a look at the novel when I go to HSSL [Humanities
and Social Sciences Library, former designation of what’s now named the Stephen
A. Schwarzman Building, the NYPL’s main facility at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street]
next.) But if only half of it’s accurate, it seems inevitable to me that
this book would have found its way to Leo. He said he was reading a sci-fi
novel or two every day as a preteenager in Miami [where Shapiro grew up] and
that he’d exhausted the local library’s collection of sci-fi books.
He’s almost bound to have come across Daumal sooner or later that way.
When he went to Windsor Mountain, he was reading all kinds of unusual
things—Windsor Mountain students were precocious readers—and he was using not
only the school library, but the local public library in Lenox.
Obviously, I can’t prove it, but I’m convinced it’s probable that Leo read Mount Analogue either as a
kid or later and made that reference to it as a way to express his feelings about
his new mountain home. (Rosalía told me he dictated the memoir and other
stuff to her and she typed it into his computer. She could easily have
misunderstood him and/or made a typo.) If there were any listing anywhere
of some mountain in NM (or anywhere else) with a name like “Antalog,” I’d have
some doubt, but since there isn’t any trace of one that I’ve found (and since antilog seems like such an
improbable match), I’m privately satisfied that the novel is the
explanation. (I’d check this with Rosalía, as I did with American Exceptionalism [American
Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, the book by Seymour Martin
LipsetI posited
Shapiro had read before his death because of another reference in his memoir
fragments], but I can’t reach her. My theater e-mail came
back as undeliverable and I tried to send her a message at her school e-mail
address where she teaches, and that didn’t get thru, either. I wonder of
she’s quit work and moved and didn’t tell me.)

As I told Kirk, I had tried to reach Rosalía to see if she
knew anything about a connection between Shapiro and the novel Mount Analogue and if the mention in
Shapiro’s memoir could have been an allusion to the book, but I hadn’t gotten
an answer to my messages.On 21 August,
however, I did finally hear from Rosalía, and she essentially confirmed what I
had come to surmise (I’ve also edited her e-mail prose a little):

Now for Leo: I actually have
the answer to your question! I have in front of me at this moment the
copy of Mount Analogue (Daumal) that Leo gave me, which was put out in a
tiny format by Shambhala Press in 1992. As I recall, he had first read it
at Windsor Mountain (doesn’t it sound like something they would have had for
required reading?), and considered it one of his favorite books ever.
He referred to the house as Mt. Analog as a sort of play on the analog/digital
divide, which was really just beginning in the ’90s (he equated the
analog/digital with the old/new, country vs. city life that he was seeking, and
also with the move away from spirituality that he perceived around him in the
city at that time). (I think I also became his Bitter-Rose at some point
. . . .) Now that I work so frequently in the digital world of 21st-century
film, I think of both the book and Leo’s idea of analog vs. digital life
often. Last year, in addition to the Theatre program, I ran a Film
Technician Training Program (FTTP) supported by the State. NM has become
known as the 3rd coast for film production, believe it or not! And
everything is digital now . . . hmmmm.

Rosalía, an actress, taught and directed theater at Northern New Mexico Community College in Española, which is near Taos and
Chamisal/Vallecito.Her reference to Bitter-Rose is to a story Daumal tells within
the novel, “The Tale of the Hollow-Men and the Bitter-Rose,” which describes a
flower that grows on Mount Analogue: “Whoever eats it [i.e., the Bitter-Rose]
finds that whenever he is about to tell a lie, aloud or to himself, his tongue
begins to burn.He can still tell
falsehoods, but he has been warned.”The
“analog/digital” dichotomy Rosalía writes about was a small theme I discussed
in my study of Shapiro:

Shapiro equated digital measures with the new technology, the city,
artificiality, while the analogue system was the old, spiritual, country, and
natural world.Digital is concrete and
discrete, specific and devoid of connotations.It cannot be interpreted or approximated, like the time on a digital
clock—precise and exact, unequivocal.Analogue is flowing, even fuzzy.It has parameters, but, like the hour read on an analogue clock, is open
to approximation, interpretation, and manipulation.A digital clock may be practical, efficient,
and unambiguous, but there is something elegant and graceful about an analogue
timepiece.

The parallel is pretty strong, as Shattuck wrote in his introduction to
the novel that “Daumal’s work
[exhibits] its resolve to fuse body and Spirit, speech and sleep, logic and
intuition.”

Rosalía’s reference to a “move away from spirituality” that Shapiro had
seen was also a theme in my study, though his foundation for the sense of loss
was the Indian cultures he’d observed around him.Shapiro was an admirer of Western and Native
American author Frank Waters, who wrote in Pumpkin Seed Point (1969; for further discussion of this writer, see “Frank
Waters,” 4 May 2012):

The monstrous paradox is that while we have created untold benefits for
all mankind, we have impoverished ourselves spiritually in the process.In achieving what seems to be a complete
triumph over nature, we have established a machine-made society so utterly
devitalized that it is anticipating the synthetic creation of life within a
laboratory test tube.

Well, that about clinched it.Not only was I right that Shapiro had read Mount Analogue, I’d guessed he might
have read it at either Windsor Mountain School in the ’60s or shortly after he
moved back to New Mexico—and it turns out he’d done both!What’s more, he found in the novel concepts
and ideas that he related to his own life and philosophy, as I suspected he
might have.When I speculated that there
were similarities between Mount Analogue
and other novels I knew Shapiro had read and absorbed, as well as other
influences he’d spoken of frequently, such as magic, science fiction, and
Eastern religions, they seemed convenient and coincidental at first, as if I
may have projected my assumptions onto the little of Daumal’s novel I’d
learned, but after Rosalía’s e-mail, it all seemed inescapable.I wrote to Kirk again on 27 August, a few
days after hearing from Rosalía:

The Mount Analogue idea,
especially because of what Rosalía said, has blossomed. Aside from the
obvious—the metaphor of the mystery mountain for Leo’s NM home and the
city-country dichotomy, which is pretty basic for Leo—I developed a small point
about the analogue vs. the digital: how the latter is precise, exact, hard, unyielding,
uninterpretable—like the time on a digital clock—and the former is fuzzy, open
to interpretation, connotative, like the time on an analogue clock.
Digital represents science, technology, the city; analogue, spirituality,
nature, the country. I’m speaking from Leo’s perspective, of course—and
figuratively. I’m interpreting how Leo seemed to feel when he moved from
NYC to Chamisal (he wrote about this sense of freedom from fear and hostility
and being part of nature [in a letter to me], so I’m not entirely guessing
here).

The whole matter is little more than a grace note in the
overall study of Shapiro’s life and work.It shows up in one paragraph of one chapter, the conclusion, and makes no
other appearances in the work.Nonetheless, my deduction (precipitated, though it was, by having
stumbled on the right reference entirely serendipitously) seemed like a huge
accomplishment.Having found Mount Analogue, everything I guessed
after that was correct.However small,
the whole Mount Analogue allusion was
revelatory and a piece in the puzzle that was Shapiro’s sense of himself and
his world in New Mexico, particularly the way it compared to what he’d left in
New York.I also can’t help feeling that
Shapiro appreciated the implication that Roger Shattuck identified, the notion
that grasping the novel’s point is itself a significant accomplishment:

I cannot help seeing Mount
Analogue as itself a peradam in the stony fields of literature.The peradam possesses such perfect
transparence that it escapes the notice of all except those who are inwardly
prepared and outwardly situated to catch sight of its glint. . . .And the peradam . . . can curve and uncurve
space because of its unique index of refraction.Mount Analogue, the novel, has the
force of a curving and uncurving lens for our minds. . . .And yet it
is hard to look through it, for
so limpid a substance almost escapes one’s attention even when it is right under one’s
eyes.One could conceivably read every
word of the book without “seeing” a thing.

[I occasionally attach a list
of sources or related publications to a post, and I think that “Mount Analogue” is one that calls for this treatment.In this instance, I’ll list the works of René
Daumal and other writers which I’ve mentioned above.

---, Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic
Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, trans. and intro. Roger
Shattuck, postface Vére Daumal (Boston: Shambhala, 1986). [This is the edition
from which I quoted; there are other versions in print and in library
collections, including, of course, the French editions.]